Highlights
- Hogwarts Legacy gets to set the standard for how the Ravenclaw common room should look, as the space is only briefly explored in the Harry Potter movies.
- The depiction of Ravenclaw in the films doesn’t accurately reflect the description in the books, with a darker color palette that doesn’t fit the source material.
- Hogwarts Legacy’s depiction of Ravenclaw stays faithful to the books, with a circular common room filled with books and tables for studying, expanding on the vision of the space.
For many fans of the Harry Potter universe, Hogwarts Legacy presents their first meaningful look into the Ravenclaw common room. While Harry visits the space in the books, and readers are presented with a description, the house is only explored in a limited capacity during the movies. Because of the common room’s somewhat elusive nature in visual media, Hogwarts Legacy in many ways gets to set the standard of how the house should look. While the game has the luxury of freedom in its design of the space, it’s still worth questioning whether Hogwarts Legacy’s depiction of Ravenclaw house is faithful to the books and movies that inspired it.
The Hogwarts houses of the Harry Potter universe are defined by the traits attributed to the members of those houses. Hogwarts has four houses and students are sorted into them by which traits they most strongly possess. Ravenclaws are known for their intelligence, wit, clever problem-solving, and academic performance. While Gryffindor was heavily featured in the films and there was a strong expectation that the game would honor that depiction in someway, Ravenclaw has been less prominent, meaning that developers mostly had to work from descriptions from the book and the traits attributed to the house’s members.
How Ravenclaw is Depicted in Harry Potter Books and Movies
Ravenclaw’s quarters appear just once in the Harry Potter movies. During Deathly Hallows Part 2, Harry visits Ravenclaw Tower. Unfortunately, he only makes it as far as the tower in the film rather than seeing the full common room as he does in the books. Furthermore, the depiction of the tower isn’t particularly accurate to how the books describe the space. The later Harry Potter films take on a much darker color palette and grim appearance throughout to reflect the solemn tone of the situation the characters find themselves. While this stylistic choice makes sense, its depiction of Ravenclaw as dark doesn’t fit the source material.
The Harry Potter novels, on the other hand, give a much more in-depth description of the house. Ravenclaw house is described as wide and circular, taking up one of the castle’s towers. The circular common room has a domed ceiling, adorned with a painting of the cosmos. This dark starry painting is matched by its midnight blue carpeting and the blue and gold curtains that line the walls. In spite of its dark blue night theme, Ravenclaw has majestic arched windows overlooking the mountains and is well-lit. The room is, fittingly, filled with a plethora of bookcases, creating an opulent study space. Ravenclaw’s bright ambiance stands in stark opposition to that of the Slytherin house.
How Hogwarts Legacy Depicts Ravenclaw
Hogwarts Legacy depicts Ravenclaw’s common room largely as the book does, though, like the other houses, it seems to be upping the size of the space. In spite of this increased size, it is still one of Hogwarts Legacy‘s smallest common rooms. When one enters the Ravenclaw common room, it is circular as described in the novels. While this initial room lacks the sky-painted ceiling, that can be found just across the hall in a semicircular room. The tower going to the dorm rooms eschews the spiral shape described by the book and is instead a more typical rectangular staircase of many flights. The space is indeed covered with books and bookshelves.
Ravenclaw’s depiction in Hogwarts Legacy is very faithful to the books, more so than the limited depiction in the film. But despite being more accurate, the developers still took creative liberty in adapting the space to a new medium. Given that Ravenclaws are known for their studiousness, Ravenclaw’s common room being a beautiful sitting space filled with books and tables to work at makes a ton of sense and Avalanche has done an excellent job of expanding that vision for the game.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.